Samsung Galaxy Gear gets its first custom kernel

Custom development on the Galaxy Gear hasn’t been as quick as one sees on smartphones, but the community has still managed to do a lot of cool stuff with Samsung’s smartwatch, including a full custom ROM and creating plenty of cool watch faces. Now, the Gear has received its first custom kernel, thanks to the efforts of XDA Recognized Developer lilstevie, called Triangulum.

At the moment, the kernel supports few features: it apparently enables the use of both cores of the CPU and allows it to run at the maximum frequency of 1.6GHz after overclocking, which should offer increased performance (not that the Gear is slow, but you can never have too much power, whether it’s a phone or watch). There’s also init.d support, which should enable firing up various scripts at startup (like zipalinging for reduced memory usage by apps, etc.), and the watch will get rooted when the kernel is flashed.

That’s a pretty small list of features (it is, after all, a smart watch and not a full-fledged smartphone), but it’s enough to kickstart what we hope will be further development on custom kernels on the Galaxy Gear, which continues to get better and better with every update. Flashing the kernel requires the usual tools – Heimdall or Odin – and you can find more details, including the download link, at the source link.